Throughout the three remaining chapters, The author’s three protagonists are Roger Bacon, Vitalis of Furno, and John of Rupescissa, among whom Vitalis rightly receives less attention. Matus argues convincingly that alchemy, even if its status was more precarious than that of other fields of knowledge, ties in with the broader tendency of engagement with creation that was such a prominent feature of early Franciscanism. The first chapter sets the stage by tracing Franciscan attitudes towards nature as God’s creation back to the order’s founder, Francis of Assisi, and his successors. Matus sets out to explore this tension during the late thirteenth century and much of the fourteenth. Throughout his compact book on Franciscans and the Elixir of Life, Zachary A. These co-existed uneasily with various statutes of the Friars Minor (101), as well as papal bulls (55–6), that all rendered the legitimacy of alchemy doubtful, whether by associating it with sorcery or counterfeiting. In the decades and centuries after its formation in 1209, the Franciscan Order acquired a certain reputation for alchemical pursuits.
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